Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Unveiling the Real Obama

Here is a bit from a post by Matt Taibbi in his Rolling Stone blog that makes clear that Obama has abandoned his left wing and moved right for purely selfing and policially calculated reasons: he wants to win re-election and he's willing to sacrifice his left to ensure his political future:

Krugman seems to believe that Obama has basically purged all of his real economic advisors and is doing what Bush did on foreign policy -- engaging in complex and portentous policy initiatives at the behest not of experts, but political advisors. Just as Bush had Karl Rove telling him when and how to launch military invasions and drop bombs on unsuspecting foreign human beings in order to establish electoral credentials, Obama might be playing chicken with the budget for the benefit of undecideds in Florida and Ohio:

Some of what we’re hearing is presumably coming from the political team, whose members seem to believe that a move toward Republican positions, reminiscent of former President Bill Clinton’s “triangulation” in the 1990s, is the key to Mr. Obama’s re-election. And Mr. Clinton did, indeed, rebound from a big defeat in the 1994 midterms to win big two years later. But some of us think that the rebound had less to do with his rhetorical move to the center than with the five million jobs the economy added over those two years — an achievement not likely to be repeated this time, especially not in the face of harsh spending cuts.

The blindness of the DLC-era "Third Way" Democratic Party continues to be an astounding thing. For more than a decade now they have been clinging to the idea that the path to electoral success is social liberalism plus laissez-faire economics – in other words, get Wall Street and corporate America to fund your campaigns, and get minorities, pro-choice and gay marriage activists (who will always frightened into loyalty by the Tea Party/Christian loonies on the other side) to march at your rallies and vote every November. They've abandoned the unions-and-jobs platform that was the party's anchor since Roosevelt, and the latest innovations all involve peeling back their own policy legacies from the 20th century. Obama's new plan, for instance, might involve slashing Medicare and Social Security under "pressure" from the Republicans.

I simply don't believe the Democrats would really be worse off with voters if they committed themselves to putting people back to work, policing Wall Street, throwing their weight behind a real public option in health care, making hedge fund managers pay the same tax rates as ordinary people, ending the pointless wars abroad, etc. That they won't do these things because they're afraid of public criticism, and "responding to pressure," is an increasingly transparent lie. This "Please, Br'er Fox, don't throw me into dat dere briar patch" deal isn't going to work for much longer. Just about everybody knows now that they want to go into that briar patch.

I agree with the above interpretation.

What it means is that American politics on both left and right are following the same script. The "mainstream" candidates appeal to their base to get nominated, but once in power they move to the centre to consolidate their chance of re-election. So, you promise pie in the sky to your "base" but you deliver the real goods to Wall Street and Corporate America in order to get the big bucks for your next election run.

I think the political right can get away with this because the right wing extremists are smart enough to realize their being used. But I think Obama will fail because his left wing base will realize their being used and will walk away from him. I think this is a serious miscalculation on the part of Obama. He is a cynical politician thinking he can make campaign speeches promising one thing and then deliver another for his "real" supporters, the bag men for Wall Street and Corporate America.